Recent content by biscuitcheese

[sarcaism] In an unrelated note, using his method of logic, we should point out that the death toll from HIV infection is technically zero because all HIV+ AIDS patients die by other diseases caused by the immunodeficiency. Furthermore it is important to distinctly point out that those...

I see on the news some restaurant owners (in japanese restaurants in asia and even a three michellin star chef in the states) have purchased radiation detectors as a guarantee of food safety (although while demonstrating on TV most hold their detectors so far away from the seafood that they are...

I am a believer that in our free country people should not be denied the right to know. So if you are interested in knowing if your food/ingedients are 'radioactive' you should be allowed to have a way of checking it yourself also since food safety authorities ultimately only check by sampling...

Most handheld detectors rely on ionization to detect radiation, either gas ionization detectors (such as geiger muller tube detectors) or variants of solid state ionization detectors. Depending on your choice of the detector it may not detect all three radiation types, e.g. some solid state...

I know it can work in a continuous neutron flux. I was getting at the idea that there should be a dose limitation at which point the efficiency of neutron capture by the film will decrease? Alternatively the GM tube reaches a saturation in signals. In both cases, what sort of dose are we talking...

It baffles the mind how many so called 'experts' were on the news early in this disaster, who were adamant that the still developing situation could not possibly be worse than the TMI incident and that a disaster rating above 4 was impossible. It seemed so obvious right from the very start...

I don't know what the sea depths are near the plant, or what kind of logistic/financial nightmare it may be, but why couldn't they hire or buy a bunch of oil tankers to sit off the coast to facilitate easier siphoning of contaminated water from the plant to the oil tankers as an expendible...

I know some neutron detectors use two GM tubes with one having a neutron capturing foil and rely on the differential measurements as a form of neutron detection. I see they can be effective as merely a detector of neutrons - since the neutron activated foil will leave one GM tube with higher...

I guess I meant by saturation, the consumption of the neutron capturing elements. Yeah, I guess depending on the choice of detector (GM tube or solidstate photodetector etc), that can be saturated too, so whichever is the bottleneck. But is one advantage, of say a measurement method using...

Isnt saturation a problem with these [neutron activation] types of detectors? I guess they work well for bursts of neutrons but what about continuous beams? Also, what mechanisms are relied upon in these detectors to cancel the noise background of gamma rays that the GM tube may also pick...

I suppose ionization or neutron activation detectors are simplest and suitable for portability. If the neutron source is directionally isotropic, can they use in tandem some form of neutron collimator to colliminate the beam first towards a magnetic material for diffraction towards the...

Neutrons are charge neutral but have non-zero nuclear spin states so they can be detected by scattering in a magnetic material. Are there portable neutron detectors of this sort? I guess you still need some form of interaction detector like a scintillating material + photodetector, but at...